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Officers from the Serious Fraud Team at Essex Police have closed down their investigation into allegations against foreign exchange investment firm CashFX and its promoters. 

In 2020, I warned the company, which is based in Panama, was using a team of UK recruiters to attract British investors who were told: ‘CashFX has always paid a daily return of between 2 per cent and 3 per cent, which is capped at 15 per cent passive income each week; this is from trading which is done on your behalf – you can literally set it up and forget it.’

CashFX marketed training manuals explaining currency trading, but recruits say the emphasis was always on trusting the scheme’s experts to trade for them. Essex-based Richard Maude, who holds the title of ‘President’ in CashFX, said: ‘If you are someone who just wants to be a passive member and earn from the trading, that’s where the money is coming from. It’s coming from the trading results the company is getting.’ 

However, many investors found that while it was easy to join the scheme and deposit money, it was far less easy to make withdrawals, even when their account showed big paper profits. The scheme operated internationally and investors’ claim losses run into hundreds of millions of pounds.

Operating a currency trading investment scheme requires authorisation from the Financial Conduct Authority. Neither CashFX nor its UK personnel were licensed by the FCA, which issued a public warning on its website, telling investors to be ‘especially wary of dealing with this unauthorised firm’. 

However, Essex Police has now told victims of CashFX: ‘We have completed numerous enquiries and at this time we are not aware, nor is there any prima facie evidence to support allegations that anyone in the UK has committed criminal offences.’ Police added simply that the scheme’s ethics were ‘questionable’.

Victims who have contacted The Mail on Sunday point out that operating a currency trading scheme without authorisation is itself a criminal offence.

And if CashFX was not, in fact, a currency trading scheme, then its promoters were using false claims to defraud investors, which is also a crime. Enquiries by regulators and police are continuing in the US, where there are also many victims.